October 22, 2004

LETTERS2theEDITOR

NOW is the time to acquire land for a new high school

Editor,
The growing communities of south Evergreen are facing a crisis at the two area high schools, Silver Creek and Evergreen Valley. Both schools are overcrowded. The East Side Union High School District would dispute this, because its “capacity” includes over 30 portables that have been at Silver Creek for more than 15 years.

Built for 1,800 students, Silver Creek High School has averaged over 2,300 students for years, and the bathrooms have never been upgraded. Measure G improvements are still two-to-three years away, and now the district is considering increasing capacity to 3,000.

The school staff knows this student body size is way too high, and the community does not want their children to compete with so many kids for so few spots in AP classes, on sports teams and in school plays—it diminishes their high school experience.

Evergreen Valley High School has also recently added 12 portables and housed almost 100 students at Evergreen Valley College in a BioTech Academy to accommodate its burgeoning population. Enrollment is more than 2,000 this year, and this first senior class is not the full size. A new classroom building at Evergreen Valley is also two-to-three years away and will only increase capacity to 2,100.

The continuing growth in south Evergreen, including the proposed 6,000 homes from the Evergreen Visioning Project developers, will make this overcrowding situation even worse. Available land sufficient for a new high school is disappearing in our area, and the district does not yet have a plan in place to acquire land and accommodate the growth.

I urge the ESUHSD board of trustees to move quickly to acquire land before it disappears. All residents of south Evergreen should write the board members and Superintendent Zendejas, and urge them to act quickly.

Express your concern, ask questions and impress upon them the urgency of the situation. This situation has gone unaddressed too long, and time has run out. Use http://www.esuhsd.org to locate email addresses for these officials.
It’s critical that your voice be heard so that the district understands both the impact and that rapid action is needed.

Thank you.

Lou Kvitek
Silver Creek Valley
Country Club

EVHS BioTech Academy off to slow start

Editor,
At the new BioTech Academy, an Evergreen Valley High School program operating on the Evergreen Valley College campus, the science students have been deprived of lab equipment since the beginning of the school year (Aug. 24).

The students at EVHS have done eight biology labs, while the BioTech Academy students—who are focused on BioTech and related subjects—have done one simple lab, the mixing of baking soda (a base) and vinegar (an acid). The students were supposed to get their supplies on Sept. 29 from the EVC mailroom, but they weren’t there.

Before this incident, there were rumors that the BioTech lab equipment was given out to the teachers at EVHS. This is absolutely horrible. The BioTech kids aren’t able to do the labs in the main subject—biology—that they enrolled in.

Someone needs to take control of this matter, find their supplies, and hand-deliver the supplies to BioTech, instead of messing with mailing.

Jason Goble,
Sophomore, EVHS
BioTech Academy

Student disappointed about bonfire, pyrotechnics elimination

Editor,
I am appalled that the Silver Creek homecoming bonfire and pyrotechnics have been banned. Recently, I had learned of the event from my Language Arts teacher, and since I had never attended an event like that, I was naturally intrigued.

However, a few weeks later, I noticed in the Evergreen Times that the bonfire had been banned. I am disgusted that an activity such as this can be cut before I had the chance to see it.

As for the safety hazard, my understanding is that this event has been going on for many years. It is also my understanding that no one has been injured by the pyrotechnics and bonfire.

Recently, the school board has been cutting many of the more enjoyable activities in our school district. I wish that the board would consider the students’ opinions and try to keep the better events active. Hopefully, the school board will clean up its act or someone, maybe even me, will intervene.

Timothy Stutz
Sophomore, Evergreen
Valley High School

Proposition 72 will increase health insurance for 1 million Californians

Editor,
If Californians let Wal-Mart dictate health care policy in this state, we can kiss our doctors goodbye.

California is in a health care crisis and every working family in Evergreen is at risk. We have the third largest uninsured population in the nation, and every year more Californians are dedicating an increasing share of their income to health care. In addition, health plans are closing, non-urgent patients are flooding emergency rooms and California hospitals predict a $3 billion shortfall over the next five years.

The declining trend in employer-based health coverage is responsible for much of this disaster. As health costs have continued to climb, employers are increasingly shifting costs to workers, gutting health care plans or eliminating coverage all together.

Many firms are now opting for a Wal-Mart style health care plan, which only provides catastrophic coverage, requires high deductibles and are only available to select employees. Even good employers are pressured to cut health plans in order to compete with the irresponsible ones.

Proposition 72 addresses this crisis. Proposition 72 is pro-working family strategy that preserves the existing employer-based health coverage system, while increasing access to health insurance for 1 million Californians.

Proposition 72 sets a basic standard for affordable health coverage by requiring that all large and medium scale firms provide a health care plan to their employees. Firms that don’t provide coverage are charged a fee, allowing the State to pay for private health care options for those workers.

Voters in Evergreen should think now about what health care might look like on Nov 2.

If Proposition 72 passes, California will be on its way to stabilizing employer-based health insurance and decreasing the number of uninsured. If Proposition 72 is defeated, get ready to kiss your doctor and your health coverage goodbye!

Phaedra Ellis- Lamkins
Executive Director,
Working Partnerships USA

(Working Partnerships USA is a nonprofit community organization committed to engaging working families in creating and implementing community-centered policy initiatives. For more information, call (408) 269 7872, ext. 574).

Do not allow the lives of our youth to be squandered by reckless president

Editor,
We just finished enjoying the wonderful multicultural “Day in the Park” at Lake Cunningham. It was a delight! I couldn’t help but notice the young boys and girls from ROTC units volunteering and providing services that day. These young people should be commended for their patriotism and community service!

Seeing them made me reflect upon what we are asking members of the military to do in Iraq today. I thought to myself about what regions and for what reasons these innocent ROTC kids might be deployed in the future.

America has near unilaterally and preemptively decided to put our kids in harm’s way, to go it alone and all because our president’s God told him too. For the last 50 or so years, American military successes have been with strong alliances—WWII, the Korean War and the 1991 Gulf War.

Failures have been much more unilateral in nature. Who has got your back is an important element when conflicts arise. George Bush seems to have little sympathy and little interest in doing anything that smacks of thoughtful and considerate deliberation.

I submit that his attitudes are those of a go-it-alone Texas wildcatter or frontier cowboy. This may work in movies, but for presidential material we deserve better. Further that 2004 is not the time for 19th century behavior.

Evergreeners, please remember the boys and girls of the ROTC. Do not allow their lives to be squandered by a reckless president. Do NOT re-elect George W. Bush on Nov. 2!

Stephen Huntington
Greystone Estates, Evergreen

Bill to allow illegal immigrants driver’s licenses should have passed

Editor,
I’m outraged that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his promise and did not sign the just Senate Bill 2895 that would allow illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses. His reason for vetoing the bill was because he felt it didn’t have adequate security requirements, but millions of others and I beg to differ.

The bill did have tougher requirements, including fingerprints and matriculate consular. It did not exceed discriminatory and unjust needs that Schwarzenegger wanted, such as making the license different in appearance. He has lost countless support and the trust of Hispanics by showing he is anti-immigrant.

But let it be known that this is no Ides of March. It is not a prelude of the fight stopping. The struggle will go on. This is just a battle lost, and the war of justice will continue and be won with the solidarity of all minorities seeking better and equal treatment.

Rodrigo Juarez
Westboro Drive, Evergreen

Resident responds to letter’s “simplistic, ridiculous” statements

Editor,
How does one begin to respond to the simplistic, erroneous and disheartening statements by S. Testa’s letter to the editor in the Sept. 25-Oct 8 issue? This paper’s readers are surely intelligent enough to see through the ridiculous statements of his letter.

That writer identifies himself as a “teacher.” As a retired educator, I acknowledge that a great majority of the public school teachers on all levels is left-leaning (as witness the positions taken by the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers), but I could never imagine they would endorse Testa’s lack of thought and analysis of serious problems.

He wrote: “If people knew what they should know…”. I guess we should be grateful that he has been given the light to “know,” while the rest of us poor souls are ignorant of his knowledge.

Incidentally, the sanctions that Testa claims killed 5,000 Iraqi children per month were caused by Saddam’s defiance of worldwide resolutions and his violations of the agreements of “Oil for Food” programs from which he siphoned billions of dollars designed for food and medicines (with the complicity of France, Germany and UN officials).

Responding to all the other claims Testa made regarding tax cuts would take too much writing. Suffice it to say more than 1 million lower-income people were completely dropped from paying any income tax and the “rich friends” of Bush still pay something like three-quarters of all the income tax money collected.

One can only hope that Testa’s misguided thoughts do not make it into the classrooms and curricula that he so disdains.

D. Marcus
Evergreen

Questions for Bush supporters

Editor,
Don’t you see Bush lied monumentally to carry the nation to war (95 percent supported it), in spite of the emotions of the moment?

Don’t you think he broke the supreme law of the land because there was no “imminent and present danger” coming from Iraq, especially after it was weakened by the sanctions and bombed two and three times a week for 12 years?

In Afghanistan, didn’t you see something funny in the U.S. troops not stopping until they apprehended the supreme evil in person, Osama, as they had him surrounded?

After Afghanistan, didn’t you see something funny when stories (from the media to the administration) about Osama suddenly stopped, and out of the clear blue sky, Iraq became the concern of the day along with its super devil in turn, Saddam?

Don’t you think maybe your Evergreen neighborhood frame of mind (like most others in America) is just too limited, and that the fact of the world in general hating Bush more than any other president in recent history should tell us something?

Don’t you think that there are lots more reasons to impeach that criminal in the White House than, say, Clinton for his silly teenage behavior with Mo Lew, and more than the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon?

The Tonkin incident (Vietnam War) was a lie, but was discovered too late. But the Bush administration is found to have lied (“misled the public” is just as bad) by the official 9-11 Commission and by 1,000 U.S. (not United Nations!) inspectors in Iraq. If you see no problems in this bunch of liars, you’ve got problems.

Don’t you get very angry at kids going to kill and die (It’s for oil for the rich, but do you see it?), when all they wanted was money for college? The poor have to kill and die to go to college, and for the rich! But hey, they get to be dead heroes, so what’s the problem?

Don’t you see something strange when the media counts the last one of America’s casualties, but doesn’t mention the 16,000, MOSTLY CIVILIANS, who were killed in the invasion alone?

Don’t you wonder how the victims and their families feel, seeing relatives killed, torn to pieces, parts of bodies of dear ones flying in the air and their blood spilling everywhere? And please don’t show that on TV! You can commit all sorts of atrocities, but you can’t allow the public to see what their tax dollars are doing at the hands of the likes of Bush.

Don’t you suspect that America is ruling the world by metal and fire (and the media here glorify it) stealing and killing, terror and destruction and that the resistance’s terror is maybe, just maybe, out of despair, in Iraq as in Palestine?

The 13 colonies have become the British Empire. Tich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist monk, invited Bush to stop and think; of course, he [Hahn] wasted his time. Nelson Mandela, like Martin Luther King years ago, said two years ago that America is the greatest threat to peace in the world.

This administration, folks, is forcing the return to or an expansion of the prehistoric era of the caves, where might makes right. You better tell your gleeful kids, that’s wrong. You say this talk is hate? Vitriol? Why don’t you stop supporting those who cause the hate? Don’t you think that Bush is at the forefront of those Neanderthals?

America is embarking on a renewed Manifest Destiny called the New American Century, meaning it’s planning to be the world’s dictator, by instituting the American Empire. Then get ready for the growing legions of hate.

It’s tragic to think that at this stage of history, the whole world could be having a decent life, and real peace based on education and justice, instead of the now eternal rhetoric of “peace,” “liberty” and “democracy.”

Who can still believe in Bush when he uses these words? But hope never dies: now only about 50 percent support him, and many less, support the war.

Sistilio Testa
11th Street, Downtown San Jose

Supervisor McHugh urges “Yes” on County Measures A & B, “No” on C

Editor,
At a time when the county already faces severe budget deficits, the board of supervisors needs flexibility to make prudent fiscal decisions. By voting yes on Measures A and B, and no on Measure C, voters will help preserve that flexibility.

Measure C’s binding arbitration proposal could cost taxpayers more than $100 million over the next five years. Measure C would take away the board’s authority to determine employee salaries and benefits and give it to outside arbitrators. The arbitrators could force the county to pay higher wages for a select few highly paid employees. As a result, the County would have to cut back on other necessary services such as health care, child welfare or public safety.

Measure B offers an important safeguard to Measure C. It gives voters veto power over any binding arbitration agreements the board determines are too costly. Measure A would amend the County Charter’s prevailing wage section to restrict comparisons to public employees in Santa Clara and five other Bay Area counties. It would also include all employer-paid contributions for employee benefits and not just salaries.

I urge voters to support Measures A and B and defeat Measure C.

Sincerely,
Pete McHugh
Supervisor, District Three
Santa Clara County

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